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A walk with a candidate: Paul Bocking takes aim at Scarborough Southwest

“I was shy about canvassing at first, fearing people would slam the door, but people have been overwhelmingly nice and polite,” says Paul Bocking, a Toronto City Council candidate in Ward 35 Scarborough Southwest. “I taught at Birchmount Park Collegiate a couple of years ago. The concerns of my students around rising TTC fares and cuts to frequency of bus routes got me interested in running.” A resident of Ward 35 for four years, he’s currently working on a PhD in Economic Geography at York and is also an occasional teacher with the TDSB. We met on the former Scarborough border at Victoria Park Ave. where the ward begins.

On Danforth Ave. Bocking points out that there are streetlights only on one side. “Toronto Hydro says they don’t need more lights,” he says. “It’s quiet here at night though, very different. People aren’t comfortable.”

Ward 35 candidate Paul Bocking at Teesdale Place, Scarborough.

An empty Danforth Ave store.

It’s a familiar story in Scarborough, a place designed for the car but in need of tweaks to make it better for the people living and spending time here. Formerly a mixed industrial area, Danforth is an interesting strip lined with automotive-related businesses and quite a few empty storefronts. It’s reminiscent, if a bit more spread out, of what Ossington Ave. was like before it became hipster ground zero.

Ward 35 is triangle-shaped, with Victoria Park and Eglinton Ave. forming the western and northern borders and the diagonal GO & Via railway corridor along the south. Taylor Creek meanders through the middle of the ward, most prominently through Warden Woods, but the trail here doesn’t continue through Pine Hills Cemetery or Dentonia golf course along with the creek.

“The ward is generally working class, there aren’t really any wealthy neighbourhoods, but there are some middle class areas,” says Bocking. “Also a large base of Bangladeshi, Tamil, Filipino and Chinese families, and British, Italian, and Maritime seniors.”

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The housing here is a mix of post-war bungalows, some still occupied by the original owners, and tower neighbourhoods like the one on Teesdale Pl. at Pharmacy Ave. where Bocking mentions the South Asian Women’s Rights Organization who are engaging people around issues like a $14 minimum wage and local hiring and employment policies. Many living here were professionals in Bangladesh or Pakistan but can only find work at places like Tim Hortons.

As we head north along Pharmacy the ghost lines of the bike lanes that were removed in 2011, like those on nearby Birchmount Rd and Jarvis St. downtown, are visible. The current councillor, Michelle Bernardinetti, even ran on removing the lanes in 2010, producing a flyer playing on this wedge issue during the bad old days of the rhetorical “war on the car.” It doesn’t take long to see cyclists here with kids from the apartment buildings taking the sidewalk rather than the fast car lanes.

When we reach Danforth Rd., meandering through the street grid as if it’s Scarborough’s answer to Broadway, Bocking says he’d like to encourage the film industry to locate here in this patchwork mix of older industrial, postwar residential, and new infill. There’s retail here too, some in strip malls and older, pre-war buildings. There are busy places like The Newfoundlander bar and Mama’s Boys Burgers, but a number of storefronts are empty, their customer base sucked away by the big box stores in the nearby Golden Mile on Eglinton.

It’s easy to see the potential here though and a project called “Please Come Again” has four artists taking over a handful of shop windows in the 3200 and 3300 blocks of Danforth Rd. until October, reviving the old-school art of visual merchandising. Repeating Ossington’s transformation is probably not the answer here, but take a walk up the Danforth and imagine it as the ward’s vibrant heart like Bocking does.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about life in the GTA. His new book, The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure is out now.

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